KEY POINTS:
Russell Wilson's family GP is Muslim and has been his GP for 16 of the 30 years he's been living in New Zealand. "At my appointment yesterday he asked why I hadn't shaved for a while," says Russell. "I explained that I was supporting the All Blacks and the Carl Hayman 'grow a beard' campaign. He looked at me rather sternly and said: 'You know this could cause us both a great deal of problems. If I wrapped a bandage around your head you'd look just like a member of the Taleban and here you are meeting a Muslim doctor. Maybe we could go public with this, announce that we are setting up our own terrorist cell and we could get deported to France for the World Cup?' It's worth a go."
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Paul Matthews says the seagull with the missing feet pictured in Sideswipe yesterday probably got caught in string or a fishing line which wrapped around its feet, eventually cut off the circulation and the feet. "The feet eventually drop off and this allows the offending string to fall away. A hazard of scavenging in a tip," he says. Another reader heard an unlikely theory that terakihi bite their feet off when the seagulls are floating in the sea, and another reader is adamant the gull suffered a terrible mountaineering ordeal from which both feet had to be amputated ... but in true Kiwi fashion plans to summit Everest next year.
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But the Yellow Pages ad gives Rosie the creeps. "I am a Kiwi and the first thing I thought when I saw it was 'Bloody fat whitey sitting there while his black slave-hands do all the work!' And the African-sounding music does nothing to dissuade me of this. I know that the hands in the iconic 'Let your fingers do the walking' are black, but I reckon they could have had a rainbow of hands doing the work there, and just make sure the ones who run into the yellow box are black to make up the logo. The rest of the family thinks they are like dead hands."
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Darko Zoroja points out that African people are brown, not pure black, like those hands in the ad, and Chris Paxton suggests the inspiration is "the hand" from the Addams Family. "The music sounds like something from the film, too." An anonymous reader says the ad makes her hysterical. She has arachnophobia. Matthew van den Berg can barely contain his outrage: "I also agree that the colour black, in fact any darkness, is totally racist and just another example of the white man keeping the strongly pigmented man down. I'm starting a petition to have all dark colours banned from use in advertising so typically sensitive minorities are saved the outrage. While we are at it, let's have night time banned and implement tough new laws to punish anybody caught in possession of a shadow. I have replaced all keys on my piano - all now comfortably beige. The All Blacks ('scuse my French) will be renamed the United Colors of Benetton and as for the All Whites - don't get me started ... "
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A reader happened to be looking out his front window yesterday around 1pm when ... "a blue Nissan calmly drove into my drive. The driver reached out of the window and helped himself to lemons from my tree. Not everybody works in the concrete jungle; some of us work from home. Had the thief knocked on the door and asked, I would gladly have given him the lemons. I'm not so sure I would, now."
Today's Video Webpick: Fox News knows how to beat up a story; here they try to convince their viewers left-wing bloggers are evil and a breeding ground for extremists (sigh) Watch it here. These are the very best online videos from Ana's online magazine Spare Room.
